The outrages which the Cardinal had thus received at the hands of the Borgian Pontiff, in unworthy vengeance for his honest opposition to the nepotism and other scandals which then disgraced the Vatican, galled his pride, tending to rouse that fierce spirit which, although alien to the character ascribed to his earlier years, became the bane of his pontificate. This was, indeed, the turning point of his life, and it developed a policy utterly at variance with his ultimate views. Having attended Charles in his march across the Alps, his ardent temperament often aided to sustain that weak monarch's wavering resolutions. Had he then considered more his country's interests, and less his private wrongs, the storm might yet have been averted, and Italy might have been spared, for a time, from those ultramontane armaments which he now conducted into her bosom, but which it was the aim of his after-life to eject. The French King, having achieved his rapid acquisition of Naples, instigated the Colonna to seize upon Ostia, and, as he passed northward, restored it to its cardinal-bishop, who there once more sought security from the Pope. But Giuliano found in his stronghold no adequate protection against so bitter and unscrupulous a foe. Alexander, on the retirement of the French army, entered into an alliance with the reinstated King of Naples, and in 1497 employed Gonsalvo di Cordova to reduce Ostia, whose garrison had embarrassed the navigation of the Tiber, and intercepted supplies from his capital. Eschewing the risks of an unavailing resistance, the Cardinal once more escaped by sea, and rejoined Charles at Lyons, whilst the Great Captain was rewarded for his easy conquest with the Golden Rose.
Cardinal della Rovere, having in 1597 been declared enemy of the Holy See, and deprived of his benefices by the Pontiff, against the will of the consistory, withdrew for security to his native shores, and awaited at Savona the conclusion of what was to many of his order a reign of terror. At the moment of Cesare Borgia's invasion of Urbino, he narrowly escaped the fate destined for his brother-in-law Guidobaldo, and his nephew, the young Prefect. On pretence of a complimentary mission to Louis XII., the papal fleet had sailed towards Provence, with orders to visit Savona, where, if the Cardinal did not voluntarily pay his respects to the envoys, he was to be inveigled on board, and carried off. But warned by past experience against civilities emanating from such a quarter, he escaped the danger by cautiously evading the perilous invitation.
The sudden and unanimous election of Giuliano to succeed Pius III.—which we have elsewhere narrated—may well be deemed marvellous, considering the various interests that distracted the conclave, and the influence still ostensibly possessed in it by Valentino, the arch-foe of the Rovere race. There could be no more convincing proof that all parties were tired of the recent system, nor of their resolution to put an end to similar enormities. His morals, though hitherto far from immaculate, were pure in comparison with those which prevailed around him; above all, his lapses were neither matter of bravado, nor of open scandal.[227] His errors were of a loftier range, and if more directly perilous to the public, they belonged to a nobler category, and sprang from generous and praiseworthy impulses, and tended to public objects and the elevation of the papacy. Ascending a throne shaken by complicated convulsions, succeeding to a treasury drained for selfish ends, and to an authority waning under long-established abuses, it was his bounden duty to beware ne aliquid detrimenti respublica capiat. But, not content with resisting such further "detriment to the commonwealth," and with recovering the ground recently lost, his conscience, more perhaps than his ambition, urged him to new triumphs. He was a great pontiff after the mediæval estimate of the papacy. Little occupying himself with the bulwarks of a faith which he presumed impregnable, or the dogmas of a church still paramount over Christendom, he considered the temporal sovereignty and aggrandisement of the Keys to be his special vocation. Like the early Guelphs, he regarded Italy as St. Peter's patrimony, to be vindicated from all intruders: to establish her nationality, and extirpate the barbarian invaders, were merely steps to that end. Italian unity, though not as yet proposed for political aspirations or utopian dreams, was the result towards which this policy would probably have led both Julius and his successor, had the former been longer spared, and had the narrow views with which the latter pursued it not involved him in continual difficulties, and accelerated the decline of papal ascendancy.
But no personal ambition ever dictated the schemes of Julius, nor did a thought for the nations whose destinies he hazarded ever cross his mind. In the spirit of a crusader he marched against Perugia and Bologna; he personally superintended the siege of Mirandula; and when he donned the casque and cuirass, it was because they were to him more familiar than the wiles of diplomacy. A stranger to those dilatory tactics which we shall find marring the reputation of his nephew, the Duke of Urbino, success crowned his aggressive measures and impetuous movements, when greater circumspection might have been attended with less advantageous results; and it was his good fortune not to outlive those reverses which his precipitation almost necessarily incurred. He was, in truth, gifted with qualities and talents befitting the camp rather than the consistory, and Francis I. pronounced him a better general of division than a pope. Had he been bred a condottiere, the political aspect of Italy might have been convulsed by him, and the papacy might have suffered still more from his sword than it did from his policy. Yet if his militant tastes occasioned greater scandal than the less blustering turbulence of Alexander and Leo, and have proved equally detrimental to popery, they are hallowed in the eyes of its champions in consideration of his purer motives. By them accordingly he is upheld as one of its pillars, while by most historians he has been mentioned as a favourable exception to the prevailing bad faith of his times. Yet, though greedy of conquest, he was far from indifferent to those internal reforms requisite for the stability of his government. According to Capello, the Venetian envoy, he possessed great practical sagacity, and was led by no one, though willing to hear all opinions. His judicious measures added two-thirds to the revenue of the Holy See, chiefly by correcting the depreciated currency in which it was paid. In personal expenses he was penuriously sparing, contracting with his house-steward, to whom he allowed but 1500 ducats for the monthly bills of the palace.[228]
But this picture has its reverse. In the two following chapters of these memoirs we shall find the head of the universal Church harassing his flock by perpetual warfare—the high-priest of the Christian hierarchy seemingly indifferent to the purity of Catholic rites, and utterly oblivious of peace and charity.
By lovers of art the memory of Julius II. will ever be embalmed among the foremost of its princely patrons, and his appreciation of literature may be learned from his remark, that letters are silver to the people, gold to the nobles, diamonds to princes. We have elsewhere to speak of his vast undertakings in architecture, sculpture, and painting, which earned from Vasari the reputation of a spirited pontiff, bent upon leaving memorials of a zealous and liberal encouragement of art. His lavish outlay on St. Peter's strikingly contrasts with his habitual economy. To meet it he authorised a general collection, towards which the Franciscans gathered 27,000 ducats, and in 1507 he proclaimed a sale of jubilee indulgences. This device laid all Christendom under contribution, and proved so productive that he and Leo were tempted almost annually to repeat it, little aware what weapons they were thus forging for future schismatics. The example of his uncle Sixtus, in summoning for the decoration of his capital whatever talent merited such patronage, was followed up by him with the energy belonging to his nature. Besides commencing the metropolitan fane, the immense cortile, corridors, and loggie of the Vatican, and the unequalled frescoes of the stanze, he was truly the founder of a museum of ancient art. He rescued the Laocoon and rewarded its discoverer; the Apollo and the Torso took their epithet of Belvidere from the pavilion in which he placed them.
Rome owes to him, among other improvements, one of its longest and finest streets, bearing his name, where he began a series of palaces for public offices and the courts of justice, unfortunately never completed. The churches which he re-founded or decorated include S. Pietro in Montorio, Sta. Agnese, SS. Apostoli, and the Madonna del Popolo. In the last of these are the beautiful windows which he brought two famous glass-painters from Marseilles to execute; and beneath them those purest specimens of the revival, in which he invited Sansovino's exquisite chisel to commemorate his talented rival Ascanio Sforza, and his cousin the Cardinal of Recanati. For objects so laudable the moment was propitious, and fortune seconded his efforts; but it was more than chance which enabled him to select at once the greatest painter, the most gifted sculptor, and the first architect whom the modern world has seen,—to give simultaneous employment worthy of their genius to Raffaele, Michael Angelo, and Bramante.
His successor has found among ourselves a biographer[*229] who brought the enthusiasm of a eulogist to grace the more solid qualifications of a historian, whose eloquence has thrown around the era of Leo a brilliancy leaving in comparative obscurity the pontificate of Julius, whence many of its rays were virtually borrowed. But the progress of our narrative will lead us to introduce some less flattered sketches of the Medicean pontiff. In stimulating the search for choice fragments of antique sculpture, the son of Lorenzo de' Medici but followed the course which his father had indicated, and which Julius had zealously pursued. St. Peter's, perverted under him into a crowning abuse destined to wean men from their old faith, had been founded by his predecessor as the mighty temple of a church, Catholic in fact as well as in name. Michael Angelo, summoned by Julius to decorate his capital with the grandest of his efforts in architecture, sculpture, and painting, was banished by his successor to waste his energies in engineering the marble quarries of Pietra Santa. Raphael was diverted by Leo from that cycle of religious frescoes which the genius of Julius had commissioned, in order to distract his powers upon multifarious, less important, and less congenial occupations.
Nor need we fear a comparison between these pontiffs on more important points of their respective policy. The wars of Julius were undertaken for the aggrandisement of the papacy, and his nephew was used as an instrument to that end. Those of Leo were waged for the interests of his family at the expense of the Holy See. The former is reported to have left five millions of golden ducats in the treasury; the latter unquestionably burdened it with heavy debts. The measures of Julius may have encouraged divisive courses and a schismatic council; but those of Leo matured the Reformation, and permitted a small cloud, which he might have dispersed while forming upon the horizon, to spread unheeded over the heavens, until Central Europe was withdrawn from the light and influence of the Roman church.
In fine, during the pontificates of Sixtus and of Julius more was done for the encouragement of literature and arts, for the temporal extension of the papacy, and for the embellishment of its metropolis, than has ever been effected in any similar period. The combined reigns of the two Medicean popes have left no equal memorials. It cannot be doubted that the patronage bestowed by his ancestors on men of science and letters was liberally continued by Leo; yet it is as much to the zeal of partial historians, as to his own policy of success, that he stands indebted for the halo of glory which marks his as a golden age. In many instances he but followed out the aims of Julius, reaping their undivided glory; in others he fell sadly short of his predecessor in energy and comprehensive views. The bad seed which he freely scattered ripened into irreparable mischiefs under his vacillating nephew, and the sack of Rome, which we shall by and by describe, was their crowning calamity. After that event the proud city was once again left desolate and impoverished, the prey of barbarian spoilers; its population thinned, its court outraged, its glories gone. When the judgment of posterity has passed into a proverb it is too late to question its equity, or to appeal from its fiat, and the name of Leo the Tenth will thus remain identified with his age as the star whence its lustre was derived, although Italy was then brightened by not a few orbs of scarcely inferior brilliancy or less genial influence.